Calle de Crevillente

The name travels to southern Alicante, to Crevillent, a town perched on the slope of its own sierra, in the Bajo Vinalopó region. There esparto grass sustained for centuries a population that scratched a living from dry farmland, and the old town still keeps the layout inherited from its Islamic past. Much of the mystery of the name comes from that past. Arabic sources recorded the place as Qirbilyân, with variants, and beneath those forms many suspect an Iberian root older than Rome. The ultimate origin of the toponym remains undocumented with any certainty. The calle de Crevillente is a short street in the Hispanoamérica neighborhood, a step from the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, one of the many pieces with which Madrid stitched the towns of all Spain into its street map.